National Blog

Your tax dollars at work

The other day, I blogged about how many in the GOP are abandoning tax cuts in favor of tax "reform," which rearranges, but doses not reduce, the tax burden imposed on the American people. I pointed out that the reason for this new position in taxes is rooted in an unwillingness of to many in the Republican Party to cut spending. Many "conservative" Republicans have even joined "liberal" Democrats in saying that government spending has already been slashed to the bone, so there is no place left to cut.

While perhaps these members are not aware that the National Science Foundation recently spent $300,000 to study "how humans interact with bikes." More details from the Free Beacon:

The premise for the project, which was conducted between October 2009 and June 2013, was that bicycle dynamics are “poorly understood,” and researchers set out to come up with new designs to encourage more Americans to bike to lower their carbon footprint.

“Although human operator control models exist for numerous aircraft and other vehicles, the bicycle with a rider is a human-vehicle system whose dynamic behavior is poorly understood,” researchers at the University of California, Davis said in a paper publishing their interim results.

The paper said the authors had “deeper questions” about how people control bikes, and argued that no designs in the last century have been made with “desired handling qualities.”

“Even the simplest models of a bicycle with a rigidly attached rider have yet to be completely understood,” the researchers wrote.

“If successful, this research will improve the fundamental understanding of how humans interact with bicycles and will help pave the way to the design of bicycles for a wider population and for a wider range of tasks,” they added.

To fulfill this goal the researchers built two bicycles and rode them on treadmills.

Instead of wasting $300,000 on bikes and treadmills, maybe these researchers should have asked Campaign for Liberty Chairman , and avid bike rider, Ron Paul how humans interact with bikes.

Now I am all for bike riding and for people of any age joining community choirs. But the federal government has no Constitutional authority to fund these type of studies and, at a time of skyrocketing deficits and economic stagnation, should funding these studies take priority over cutting spending and taxes?